Developing a real-time ITS using VANETs: A case study for Northampton Town

Abstract

Nowadays, road congestion issue is considered one of the most serious problems facing road users in various cities of the world. Therefore, tremendous research has been done in this field. Road information could significantly help to estimate congestion level on streets, leading to reduce traffic jams and decrease journey time, fuel consumption and pollution. In this sense, this paper proposes IRCA (Intelligent Road Congestion Avoidance), a new algorithm based on vehicle to Road Side Unit (RSU) communication type and graph theory to estimate traffic congestion in real time. Furthermore, it capable of providing suitable alternative routes and conveying these to the relevant vehicles. Northampton town was chosen as a location for modelling the proposed approach. In this paper, two cases have been compared; with and without IRCA algorithm. The simulation results indicate a significant reduction in terms of delay time, which means that the proposed algorithm has a better real-time management tool for dealing with traffic congestion.